Opinie o ebooku White Fang - Jack London

Fragment ebooka White Fang - Jack London

Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), was an
American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A
pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine
fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a huge financial
success from writing. Source: Wikipedia

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Chapter1
THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen
waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of
their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each
other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence
reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation,
lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it
was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of
laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a
laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter
cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of
infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom
of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of
life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland
Wild.

But there was life, abroad in the land and
defiant. Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish
dogs. Their bristly fur was rimed with frost. Their
breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in
spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and
formed into crystals of frost. Leather harness was on the
dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged
along behind. The sled was without runners. It was made
of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow.
The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to
force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave
before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and
narrow oblong box. There were other things on the
sled—blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan; but
prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow
oblong box.

In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man.
At the rear of the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in
the box, lay a third man whose toil was over,—a man whom the Wild
had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor
struggle again. It is not the way of the Wild to like
movement. Life is an offence to it, for life is movement; and
the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the
water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of
the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most
ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into
submission man—man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt
against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the
cessation of movement.

But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two
men who were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur
and soft-tanned leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were
so coated with the crystals from their frozen breath that their
faces were not discernible. This gave them the seeming of
ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of
some ghost. But under it all they were men, penetrating the
land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent
on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a
world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of
space.

They travelled on without speech, saving their breath for the
work of their bodies. On every side was the silence, pressing
upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds
as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the
diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness
and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest
recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from
the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue
self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves
finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and
little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind
elements and forces.

An hour went by, and a second hour. The pale light of the
short sunless day was beginning to fade, when a faint far cry arose
on the still air. It soared upward with a swift rush, till it
reached its topmost note, where it persisted, palpitant and tense,
and then slowly died away. It might have been a lost soul
wailing, had it not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and
hungry eagerness. The front man turned his head until his
eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across the
narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other.

A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like
shrillness. Both men located the sound. It was to the
rear, somewhere in the snow expanse they had just traversed.
A third and answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the left
of the second cry.

“They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front.

His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with
apparent effort.

“Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a
rabbit sign for days.”

Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for
the hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them.

At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into a cluster of
spruce trees on the edge of the waterway and made a camp. The
coffin, at the side of the fire, served for seat and table.
The wolf-dogs, clustered on the far side of the fire, snarled and
bickered among themselves, but evinced no inclination to stray off
into the darkness.

Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot of coffee
with a piece of ice, nodded. Nor did he speak till he had
taken his seat on the coffin and begun to eat.

“They know where their hides is safe,” he said. “They’d
sooner eat grub than be grub. They’re pretty wise, them
dogs.”

Bill shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

His comrade looked at him curiously. “First time I ever
heard you say anything about their not bein’ wise.”

“Henry,” said the other, munching with deliberation the beans he
was eating, “did you happen to notice the way them dogs kicked up
when I was a-feedin’ ’em?”

“They did cut up more’n usual,” Henry acknowledged.

“How many dogs ’ve we got, Henry?”

“Six.”

“Well, Henry … ” Bill stopped for a moment, in order that
his words might gain greater significance. “As I was sayin’,
Henry, we’ve got six dogs. I took six fish out of the
bag. I gave one fish to each dog, an’, Henry, I was one fish
short.”

“You counted wrong.”

“We’ve got six dogs,” the other reiterated
dispassionately. “I took out six fish. One Ear didn’t
get no fish. I came back to the bag afterward an’ got ’m his
fish.”

“We’ve only got six dogs,” Henry said.

“Henry,” Bill went on. “I won’t say they was all dogs, but
there was seven of ’m that got fish.”

Henry stopped eating to glance across the fire and count the
dogs.

“There’s only six now,” he said.

“I saw the other one run off across the snow,” Bill announced
with cool positiveness. “I saw seven.”

Henry looked at him commiseratingly, and said, “I’ll be almighty
glad when this trip’s over.”

“What d’ye mean by that?” Bill demanded.

“I mean that this load of ourn is gettin’ on your nerves, an’
that you’re beginnin’ to see things.”

“I thought of that,” Bill answered gravely. “An’ so, when
I saw it run off across the snow, I looked in the snow an’ saw its
tracks. Then I counted the dogs an’ there was still six of
’em. The tracks is there in the snow now. D’ye want to
look at ’em? I’ll show ’em to you.”

Henry did not reply, but munched on in silence, until, the meal
finished, he topped it with a final cup of coffee. He wiped
his mouth with the back of his hand and said:

“Then you’re thinkin’ as it was—”

A long wailing cry, fiercely sad, from somewhere in the
darkness, had interrupted him. He stopped to listen to it,
then he finished his sentence with a wave of his hand toward the
sound of the cry, “—one of them?”

Bill nodded. “I’d a blame sight sooner think that than
anything else. You noticed yourself the row the dogs
made.”

Cry after cry, and answering cries, were turning the silence
into a bedlam. From every side the cries arose, and the dogs
betrayed their fear by huddling together and so close to the fire
that their hair was scorched by the heat. Bill threw on more
wood, before lighting his pipe.

“I’m thinking you’re down in the mouth some,” Henry said.

“Henry … ” He sucked meditatively at his pipe for
some time before he went on. “Henry, I was a-thinkin’ what a
blame sight luckier he is than you an’ me’ll ever be.”

He indicated the third person by a downward thrust of the thumb
to the box on which they sat.

“You an’ me, Henry, when we die, we’ll be lucky if we get enough
stones over our carcases to keep the dogs off of us.”

“What gets me, Henry, is what a chap like this, that’s a lord or
something in his own country, and that’s never had to bother about
grub nor blankets; why he comes a-buttin’ round the Godforsaken
ends of the earth—that’s what I can’t exactly see.”

“He might have lived to a ripe old age if he’d stayed at home,”
Henry agreed.

Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind.
Instead, he pointed towards the wall of darkness that pressed about
them from every side. There was no suggestion of form in the
utter blackness; only could be seen a pair of eyes gleaming like
live coals. Henry indicated with his head a second pair, and
a third. A circle of the gleaming eyes had drawn about their
camp. Now and again a pair of eyes moved, or disappeared to
appear again a moment later.

The unrest of the dogs had been increasing, and they stampeded,
in a surge of sudden fear, to the near side of the fire, cringing
and crawling about the legs of the men. In the scramble one
of the dogs had been overturned on the edge of the fire, and it had
yelped with pain and fright as the smell of its singed coat
possessed the air. The commotion caused the circle of eyes to
shift restlessly for a moment and even to withdraw a bit, but it
settled down again as the dogs became quiet.

“Henry, it’s a blame misfortune to be out of ammunition.”

Bill had finished his pipe and was helping his companion to
spread the bed of fur and blanket upon the spruce boughs which he
had laid over the snow before supper. Henry grunted, and
began unlacing his mocassins.

“How many cartridges did you say you had left?” he asked.

“Three,” came the answer. “An’ I wisht ’twas three
hundred. Then I’d show ’em what for, damn ’em!”

He shook his fist angrily at the gleaming eyes, and began
securely to prop his moccasins before the fire.

“An’ I wisht this cold snap’d break,” he went on. “It’s
ben fifty below for two weeks now. An’ I wisht I’d never
started on this trip, Henry. I don’t like the looks of
it. I don’t feel right, somehow. An’ while I’m wishin’,
I wisht the trip was over an’ done with, an’ you an’ me a-sittin’
by the fire in Fort McGurry just about now an’ playing
cribbage—that’s what I wisht.”

Henry grunted and crawled into bed. As he dozed off he was
aroused by his comrade’s voice.

“Say, Henry, that other one that come in an’ got a fish—why
didn’t the dogs pitch into it? That’s what’s botherin’
me.”

“You’re botherin’ too much, Bill,” came the sleepy
response. “You was never like this before. You jes’
shut up now, an’ go to sleep, an’ you’ll be all hunkydory in the
mornin’. Your stomach’s sour, that’s what’s botherin’
you.”

The men slept, breathing heavily, side by side, under the one
covering. The fire died down, and the gleaming eyes drew
closer the circle they had flung about the camp. The dogs
clustered together in fear, now and again snarling menacingly as a
pair of eyes drew close. Once their uproar became so loud
that Bill woke up. He got out of bed carefully, so as not to
disturb the sleep of his comrade, and threw more wood on the
fire. As it began to flame up, the circle of eyes drew
farther back. He glanced casually at the huddling dogs.
He rubbed his eyes and looked at them more sharply. Then he
crawled back into the blankets.

“Henry,” he said. “Oh, Henry.”

Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded,
“What’s wrong now?”

“Nothin’,” came the answer; “only there’s seven of ’em
again. I just counted.”

Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that
slid into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.

In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his
companion out of bed. Daylight was yet three hours away,
though it was already six o’clock; and in the darkness Henry went
about preparing breakfast, while Bill rolled the blankets and made
the sled ready for lashing.

“Say, Henry,” he asked suddenly, “how many dogs did you say we
had?”

“Six.”

“Wrong,” Bill proclaimed triumphantly.

“Seven again?” Henry queried.

“No, five; one’s gone.”

“The hell!” Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to
come and count the dogs.

“You’re right, Bill,” he concluded. “Fatty’s gone.”

“An’ he went like greased lightnin’ once he got started.
Couldn’t ’ve seen ’m for smoke.”

“No chance at all,” Henry concluded. “They jes’ swallowed
’m alive. I bet he was yelpin’ as he went down their throats,
damn ’em!”

“He always was a fool dog,” said Bill.

“But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an’ commit
suicide that way.” He looked over the remainder of the team
with a speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient traits
of each animal. “I bet none of the others would do it.”

“Couldn’t drive ’em away from the fire with a club,” Bill
agreed. “I always did think there was somethin’ wrong with
Fatty anyway.”

And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland
trail—less scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a
man.

Chapter2
THE SHE-WOLF

Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the
men turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the
darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely
sad—cries that called through the darkness and cold to one another
and answered back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came
at nine o’clock. At midday the sky to the south warmed to
rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened
between the meridian sun and the northern world. But the
rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that
remained lasted until three o’clock, when it, too, faded, and the
pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent
land.

As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and
rear drew closer—so close that more than once they sent surges of
fear through the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived
panics.

At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got
the dogs back in the traces, Bill said:

Henry was bending over and adding ice to the babbling pot of
beans when he was startled by the sound of a blow, an exclamation
from Bill, and a sharp snarling cry of pain from among the
dogs. He straightened up in time to see a dim form
disappearing across the snow into the shelter of the dark.
Then he saw Bill, standing amid the dogs, half triumphant, half
crestfallen, in one hand a stout club, in the other the tail and
part of the body of a sun-cured salmon.

“It got half of it,” he announced; “but I got a whack at it jes’
the same. D’ye hear it squeal?”

“What’d it look like?” Henry asked.

“Couldn’t see. But it had four legs an’ a mouth an’ hair
an’ looked like any dog.”

“Must be a tame wolf, I reckon.”

“It’s damned tame, whatever it is, comin’ in here at feedin’
time an’ gettin’ its whack of fish.”

That night, when supper was finished and they sat on the oblong
box and pulled at their pipes, the circle of gleaming eyes drew in
even closer than before.

Henry grunted with an intonation that was not all sympathy, and
for a quarter of an hour they sat on in silence, Henry staring at
the fire, and Bill at the circle of eyes that burned in the
darkness just beyond the firelight.

In the morning Henry was aroused by fervid blasphemy that
proceeded from the mouth of Bill. Henry propped himself up on
an elbow and looked to see his comrade standing among the dogs
beside the replenished fire, his arms raised in objurgation, his
face distorted with passion.

“Hello!” Henry called. “What’s up now?”

“Frog’s gone,” came the answer.

“No.”

“I tell you yes.”

Henry leaped out of the blankets and to the dogs. He
counted them with care, and then joined his partner in cursing the
power of the Wild that had robbed them of another dog.

“Frog was the strongest dog of the bunch,” Bill pronounced
finally.

“An’ he was no fool dog neither,” Henry added.

And so was recorded the second epitaph in two days.

A gloomy breakfast was eaten, and the four remaining dogs were
harnessed to the sled. The day was a repetition of the days
that had gone before. The men toiled without speech across
the face of the frozen world. The silence was unbroken save
by the cries of their pursuers, that, unseen, hung upon their
rear. With the coming of night in the mid-afternoon, the
cries sounded closer as the pursuers drew in according to their
custom; and the dogs grew excited and frightened, and were guilty
of panics that tangled the traces and further depressed the two
men.

“There, that’ll fix you fool critters,” Bill said with
satisfaction that night, standing erect at completion of his
task.

Henry left the cooking to come and see. Not only had his
partner tied the dogs up, but he had tied them, after the Indian
fashion, with sticks. About the neck of each dog he had
fastened a leather thong. To this, and so close to the neck
that the dog could not get his teeth to it, he had tied a stout
stick four or five feet in length. The other end of the
stick, in turn, was made fast to a stake in the ground by means of
a leather thong. The dog was unable to gnaw through the
leather at his own end of the stick. The stick prevented him
from getting at the leather that fastened the other end.

Henry nodded his head approvingly.

“It’s the only contraption that’ll ever hold One Ear,” he
said. “He can gnaw through leather as clean as a knife an’
jes’ about half as quick. They all’ll be here in the mornin’
hunkydory.”

“They jes’ know we ain’t loaded to kill,” Henry remarked at
bed-time, indicating the gleaming circle that hemmed them in.
“If we could put a couple of shots into ’em, they’d be more
respectful. They come closer every night. Get the
firelight out of your eyes an’ look hard—there! Did you see
that one?”

For some time the two men amused themselves with watching the
movement of vague forms on the edge of the firelight. By
looking closely and steadily at where a pair of eyes burned in the
darkness, the form of the animal would slowly take shape.
They could even see these forms move at times.

A sound among the dogs attracted the men’s attention. One
Ear was uttering quick, eager whines, lunging at the length of his
stick toward the darkness, and desisting now and again in order to
make frantic attacks on the stick with his teeth.

“Look at that, Bill,” Henry whispered.

Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement,
glided a doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust
and daring, cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on
the dogs. One Ear strained the full length of the stick
toward the intruder and whined with eagerness.

“That fool One Ear don’t seem scairt much,” Bill said in a low
tone.

“It’s a she-wolf,” Henry whispered back, “an’ that accounts for
Fatty an’ Frog. She’s the decoy for the pack. She draws
out the dog an’ then all the rest pitches in an’ eats ’m up.”

The fire crackled. A log fell apart with a loud
spluttering noise. At the sound of it the strange animal
leaped back into the darkness.

“Henry, I’m a-thinkin’,” Bill announced.

“Thinkin’ what?”

“I’m a-thinkin’ that was the one I lambasted with the club.”

“Ain’t the slightest doubt in the world,” was Henry’s
response.

“An’ right here I want to remark,” Bill went on, “that that
animal’s familyarity with campfires is suspicious an’ immoral.”

“It knows for certain more’n a self-respectin’ wolf ought to
know,” Henry agreed. “A wolf that knows enough to come in
with the dogs at feedin’ time has had experiences.”

“Ol’ Villan had a dog once that run away with the wolves,” Bill
cogitates aloud. “I ought to know. I shot it out of the
pack in a moose pasture over ‘on Little Stick. An’ Ol’ Villan
cried like a baby. Hadn’t seen it for three years, he
said. Ben with the wolves all that time.”

“I reckon you’ve called the turn, Bill. That wolf’s a dog,
an’ it’s eaten fish many’s the time from the hand of man.”

“An if I get a chance at it, that wolf that’s a dog’ll be jes’
meat,” Bill declared. “We can’t afford to lose no more
animals.”

“But you’ve only got three cartridges,” Henry objected.

“I’ll wait for a dead sure shot,” was the reply.

In the morning Henry renewed the fire and cooked breakfast to
the accompaniment of his partner’s snoring.

“You was sleepin’ jes’ too comfortable for anything,” Henry told
him, as he routed him out for breakfast. “I hadn’t the heart
to rouse you.”

Bill began to eat sleepily. He noticed that his cup was
empty and started to reach for the pot. But the pot was
beyond arm’s length and beside Henry.

“Say, Henry,” he chided gently, “ain’t you forgot
somethin’?”

Henry looked about with great carefulness and shook his
head. Bill held up the empty cup.

“You don’t get no coffee,” Henry announced.

“Ain’t run out?” Bill asked anxiously.

“Nope.”

“Ain’t thinkin’ it’ll hurt my digestion?”

“Nope.”

A flush of angry blood pervaded Bill’s face.

“Then it’s jes’ warm an’ anxious I am to be hearin’ you explain
yourself,” he said.

“Spanker’s gone,” Henry answered.

Without haste, with the air of one resigned to misfortune Bill
turned his head, and from where he sat counted the dogs.

“The darned cuss.” Bill spoke gravely and slowly, with no
hint of the anger that was raging within. “Jes’ because he
couldn’t chew himself loose, he chews Spanker loose.”

“Well, Spanker’s troubles is over anyway; I guess he’s digested
by this time an’ cavortin’ over the landscape in the bellies of
twenty different wolves,” was Henry’s epitaph on this, the latest
lost dog. “Have some coffee, Bill.”

But Bill shook his head.

“Go on,” Henry pleaded, elevating the pot.

Bill shoved his cup aside. “I’ll be ding-dong-danged if I
do. I said I wouldn’t if ary dog turned up missin’, an’ I
won’t.”

“It’s darn good coffee,” Henry said enticingly.

But Bill was stubborn, and he ate a dry breakfast washed down
with mumbled curses at One Ear for the trick he had played.

“I’ll tie ’em up out of reach of each other to-night,” Bill
said, as they took the trail.

They had travelled little more than a hundred yards, when Henry,
who was in front, bent down and picked up something with which his
snowshoe had collided. It was dark, and he could not see it,
but he recognised it by the touch. He flung it back, so that
it struck the sled and bounced along until it fetched up on Bill’s
snowshoes.

“Mebbe you’ll need that in your business,” Henry said.

Bill uttered an exclamation. It was all that was left of
Spanker—the stick with which he had been tied.

Henry laughed defiantly. “I ain’t been trailed this way by
wolves before, but I’ve gone through a whole lot worse an’ kept my
health. Takes more’n a handful of them pesky critters to do
for yours truly, Bill, my son.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Bill muttered ominously.

“Well, you’ll know all right when we pull into McGurry.”

“I ain’t feelin’ special enthusiastic,” Bill persisted.

“You’re off colour, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Henry
dogmatised. “What you need is quinine, an’ I’m goin’ to dose
you up stiff as soon as we make McGurry.”

Bill grunted his disagreement with the diagnosis, and lapsed
into silence. The day was like all the days. Light came
at nine o’clock. At twelve o’clock the southern horizon was
warmed by the unseen sun; and then began the cold grey of afternoon
that would merge, three hours later, into night.

It was just after the sun’s futile effort to appear, that Bill
slipped the rifle from under the sled-lashings and said:

“You keep right on, Henry, I’m goin’ to see what I can see.”

“You’d better stick by the sled,” his partner protested.
“You’ve only got three cartridges, an’ there’s no tellin’ what
might happen.”

“Who’s croaking now?” Bill demanded triumphantly.

Henry made no reply, and plodded on alone, though often he cast
anxious glances back into the grey solitude where his partner had
disappeared. An hour later, taking advantage of the cut-offs
around which the sled had to go, Bill arrived.

“They’re scattered an’ rangin’ along wide,” he said: “keeping up
with us an’ lookin’ for game at the same time. You see,
they’re sure of us, only they know they’ve got to wait to get
us. In the meantime they’re willin’ to pick up anything
eatable that comes handy.”

“You mean they think they’re sure of us,”
Henry objected pointedly.

But Bill ignored him. “I seen some of them. They’re
pretty thin. They ain’t had a bite in weeks I reckon, outside
of Fatty an’ Frog an’ Spanker; an’ there’s so many of ’em that that
didn’t go far. They’re remarkable thin. Their ribs is
like wash-boards, an’ their stomachs is right up against their
backbones. They’re pretty desperate, I can tell you.
They’ll be goin’ mad, yet, an’ then watch out.”

A few minutes later, Henry, who was now travelling behind the
sled, emitted a low, warning whistle. Bill turned and looked,
then quietly stopped the dogs. To the rear, from around the
last bend and plainly into view, on the very trail they had just
covered, trotted a furry, slinking form. Its nose was to the
trail, and it trotted with a peculiar, sliding, effortless
gait. When they halted, it halted, throwing up its head and
regarding them steadily with nostrils that twitched as it caught
and studied the scent of them.

“It’s the she-wolf,” Bill answered.

The dogs had lain down in the snow, and he walked past them to
join his partner in the sled. Together they watched the
strange animal that had pursued them for days and that had already
accomplished the destruction of half their dog-team.

After a searching scrutiny, the animal trotted forward a few
steps. This it repeated several times, till it was a short
hundred yards away. It paused, head up, close by a clump of
spruce trees, and with sight and scent studied the outfit of the
watching men. It looked at them in a strangely wistful way,
after the manner of a dog; but in its wistfulness there was none of
the dog affection. It was a wistfulness bred of hunger, as
cruel as its own fangs, as merciless as the frost itself.

It was large for a wolf, its gaunt frame advertising the lines
of an animal that was among the largest of its kind.

“Stands pretty close to two feet an’ a half at the shoulders,”
Henry commented. “An’ I’ll bet it ain’t far from five feet
long.”

“Kind of strange colour for a wolf,” was Bill’s criticism.
“I never seen a red wolf before. Looks almost cinnamon to
me.”

The animal was certainly not cinnamon-coloured. Its coat
was the true wolf-coat. The dominant colour was grey, and yet
there was to it a faint reddish hue—a hue that was baffling, that
appeared and disappeared, that was more like an illusion of the
vision, now grey, distinctly grey, and again giving hints and
glints of a vague redness of colour not classifiable in terms of
ordinary experience.

“Looks for all the world like a big husky sled-dog,” Bill
said. “I wouldn’t be s’prised to see it wag its tail.”

“Hello, you husky!” he called. “Come here, you
whatever-your-name-is.”

“Ain’t a bit scairt of you,” Henry laughed.

Bill waved his hand at it threateningly and shouted loudly; but
the animal betrayed no fear. The only change in it that they
could notice was an accession of alertness. It still regarded
them with the merciless wistfulness of hunger. They were
meat, and it was hungry; and it would like to go in and eat them if
it dared.

“Look here, Henry,” Bill said, unconsciously lowering his voice
to a whisper because of what he imitated. “We’ve got three
cartridges. But it’s a dead shot. Couldn’t miss
it. It’s got away with three of our dogs, an’ we oughter put
a stop to it. What d’ye say?”

Henry nodded his consent. Bill cautiously slipped the gun
from under the sled-lashing. The gun was on the way to his
shoulder, but it never got there. For in that instant the
she-wolf leaped sidewise from the trail into the clump of spruce
trees and disappeared.

The two men looked at each other. Henry whistled long and
comprehendingly.

“I might have knowed it,” Bill chided himself aloud as he
replaced the gun. “Of course a wolf that knows enough to come
in with the dogs at feedin’ time, ’d know all about
shooting-irons. I tell you right now, Henry, that critter’s
the cause of all our trouble. We’d have six dogs at the
present time, ’stead of three, if it wasn’t for her. An’ I
tell you right now, Henry, I’m goin’ to get her. She’s too
smart to be shot in the open. But I’m goin’ to lay for
her. I’ll bushwhack her as sure as my name is Bill.”

“You needn’t stray off too far in doin’ it,” his partner
admonished. “If that pack ever starts to jump you, them three
cartridges’d be wuth no more’n three whoops in hell. Them
animals is damn hungry, an’ once they start in, they’ll sure get
you, Bill.”

They camped early that night. Three dogs could not drag
the sled so fast nor for so long hours as could six, and they were
showing unmistakable signs of playing out. And the men went
early to bed, Bill first seeing to it that the dogs were tied out
of gnawing-reach of one another.

But the wolves were growing bolder, and the men were aroused
more than once from their sleep. So near did the wolves
approach, that the dogs became frantic with terror, and it was
necessary to replenish the fire from time to time in order to keep
the adventurous marauders at safer distance.

“I’ve hearn sailors talk of sharks followin’ a ship,” Bill
remarked, as he crawled back into the blankets after one such
replenishing of the fire. “Well, them wolves is land
sharks. They know their business better’n we do, an’ they
ain’t a-holdin’ our trail this way for their health. They’re
goin’ to get us. They’re sure goin’ to get us, Henry.”

“They’ve half got you a’ready, a-talkin’ like that,” Henry
retorted sharply. “A man’s half licked when he says he
is. An’ you’re half eaten from the way you’re goin’ on about
it.”

“They’ve got away with better men than you an’ me,” Bill
answered.

“Oh, shet up your croakin’. You make me all-fired
tired.”

Henry rolled over angrily on his side, but was surprised that
Bill made no similar display of temper. This was not Bill’s
way, for he was easily angered by sharp words. Henry thought
long over it before he went to sleep, and as his eyelids fluttered
down and he dozed off, the thought in his mind was: “There’s no
mistakin’ it, Bill’s almighty blue. I’ll have to cheer him up
to-morrow.”